Juan Álvarez (RUB)
Vicarious remembering and mnemic genuineness

Abstract: Vicarious remembering occurs when a subject recollects an event experienced by someone else, typically on the basis of second- or third-hand testimony about that event. This phenomenon has garnered considerable attention in the psychology of memory, with some researchers supporting what I call “vicariism.” According to this view, vicarious remembering is a genuine form of remembering, and theories of episodic memory should therefore be expanded to accommodate it (Pillemer et al. 2015, 2024; Pond and Peterson 2020). However, discussions of the nature of vicarious remembering are conspicuously absent from the philosophy of memory literature (though see De Ávila 2025). In this talk, I provide a systematic discussion of the potential genuineness of vicarious remembering and argue that vicariism warrants closer examination for two reasons. First, appropriate causation and retrieval reliability—two prominent criteria of mnemic genuineness—rule out the genuineness of vicarious remembering. Second, while recent formulations of these criteria can accommodate vicariism (Werning 2020; Michaelian 2024), they do so at the expense of abandoning “first-handedness,” the principle according to which a genuine memory of a particular both presents itself as directly originating in one’s past first-hand experience of that particular and provides first-hand knowledge of it.